Labor Rules Snarl U.S. Commuter Trains

13Aug 27, 2012 6:31 PM EDT

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Railroading has, like almost all
industries, made great strides in labor productivity since its
inception more than two centuries ago.

From the replacement of horses with steam engines in the
19th century to the elimination of drivers entirely with recent
generations of automated trains, railway engineers have been
relentless in the pursuit of more efficient transit.

For the past 50 years, however, this progress has eluded
passenger rail in the U.S. While unions and management squabble
over wages and benefits, the overarching issue of labor
productivity remains unresolved. The resulting high labor costs
drag down service, prevent new lines from opening, and depress
ridership and revenues.

Inefficient use of labor is found throughout American
transit, but nowhere more so than with the nation’s regional, or
commuter, railroads. Built decades before the first subways,
these lines are some of the oldest, and their labor practices
are antiquated. As a result of their high labor costs, regional
railways are treated as a luxury commuter service for
suburbanites, with few attempts made to operate the lines more
like the high-frequency, low-cost rapid transit that they have
the potential to be.

According to Vukan Vuchic, a professor of transportation
engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, the main
impediment to more frequent service is the way that tickets and
fares are collected.

Unneeded Conductors

The standard regional-rail operating practice of having an
onboard conductor punch every ticket on every ride is “extremely
obsolete,” he says. “The conductors stepping on and off the
train, punching tickets, shouting -- it’s very 19th century.”

Instead, he argues, regional railroads should adopt leaner
train crews, allowing them to run more trains an hour. In other
words, get rid of conductors. Turnstiles would replace them on
busy lines, with proof-of-payment systems for those with less
traffic. This honor system enforced by occasional ticket checks
with heavy fines for fare dodgers was popularized in Europe, and
has already spread to buses and newer North American rail
systems.

Compared with the current practice of having as many as
four or five employees on long rush-hour trains, having just one
-- the driver -- would drastically cut the cost of adding more
frequent service. In the Philadelphia area, Vuchic says, “it
would allow us to replace four-car trains every hour with two-car trains every half-hour at the same cost. And if they could
really give us two trains per hour, I’m sure ridership would go
up 20 to 30 percent.”

The idea of converting regional-rail lines with conductors
to rapid transit lines with ticket gates goes back almost a
half-century. In 1966, the Illinois Central Railroad started
installing magnetic ticket gates in stations along what is now
the Metra Electric line, which connects Chicago’s Loop to its
southern suburbs, passing through wide swaths of Chicago’s South
Side, including Hyde Park and the University of Chicago.

In the 1960s, service was only half what it was at its
peak, but trains along the Illinois Central were serving the
suburbs every 40 minutes and the South Side every 20, with more
during rush hour. Just as Japanese and Western European
railroads were doing, the Illinois Central installed automatic
fare gates and sought to emulate rapid-transit practices by
paring train crews down to just an engineer and conductor.

Work Rules

The railroad’s reforms were thwarted by labor arbitrators
and eventually a short strike, according to a 1998 report by
John Allen of Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority. Any
trains with six or more cars were required to have three-person
crews. Unable to make a profit amid declining ridership and high
labor costs, the RTA started subsidizing Chicago regional-rail
service along the Illinois Central in 1976, and bought the
tracks outright in 1987.

But organized labor is only one obstacle to reform.
Management and politicians also have to want it, and it’s not
clear they do.

Philadelphia has perhaps the most extensive U.S. regional
rail network, and the wasted potential to go along with it. Its
Center City Commuter Connection, which linked the terminal
stations of the Pennsylvania and Reading railroads, allowed
trains to run through the city without stopping to turn around,
increasing capacity and bringing the system to the same level as
express rapid-transit systems in Germany and France. Add in its
totally electrified network, and the regional-rail
infrastructure of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation
Authority is the perfect candidate for an upgrade.

David Gunn was general manager of Septa when the
Philadelphia transit authority took over the network from
Conrail in 1983, and faced down the regional rail unions in a
strike that lasted more than three months. Management eventually
won the right to assign work in maintenance shops without
onerous craft-union restrictions, as well as the right to assign
engineers to drive between the old lines of the Reading Railroad
and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Reached by telephone at his home
in Nova Scotia, Gunn said Septa managers also won the ability to
set train crews at rapid transit levels if they so desired.

Vuchic, who designed Philadelphia’s original through-running system, has been advocating for decades to upgrade the
commuter-rail system to rapid-transit standards, to no avail.

“I don’t think they have even pressed the unions to do it,
but they’re using them as an excuse to not make any change,” he
said, referring to the authority’s management. “They’re not even
trying!”

Platform Problem

Vuchic also cited Septa’s regional-rail platform heights as
an indication that the impediments to reform are bigger than the
unions. Besides taking tickets, conductors are also needed on
regional trains to cover the cars’ stairway for high-platform
stations, and uncover them for those with low platforms. Getting
rid of conductors requires that every station on a line be given
a high platform, flush with train floors -- something that Septa
has made no systematic attempt to do, according to Vuchic.

The problem isn’t limited to the nation’s regional
railroads. The New York City Subway and its New Jersey
counterpart, the PATH (for Port Authority Trans-Hudson), have
clung to their conductors long after other U.S. rapid-transit
systems cut back to a single worker driving and controlling its
doors.

And the labor issues in New York’s transit system extend
outside of the train cars. When asked by transit blogger
Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael
Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan
Transportation Authority’s capital construction division, gave a
two-word answer: “work rules.” Citing the example of the city’s
revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring
machine work that Spain does with nine.

To the extent that organized labor is opposed to
rationalizing staffing levels, John Allen argued that major
service increases should accompany the elimination of redundant
positions. “The intention is to build a win-win situation for
all parties,” he wrote. “Management gains greater efficiency,
labor enjoys a greater number of more secure jobs, and customers
benefit from more frequent service at all hours.”

(Stephen Smith is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York, who
covers land use and transportation. The opinions expressed are
his own. Read his first article here.)

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